How OpenCrane works

A five-minute, plain-English tour of the main ideas. Once these click, the rest of the docs are easy.

The big picture

You run one control plane — the place you manage everything from (through the oc command-line tool or the API). From there you hand out assistants to people and decide what each one can do.

        You ──▶  Control plane  ──▶  an assistant for each person
                 (manage it all)      Alice · Bob · Carla · …

The words you'll see

Employee assistant

A private AI coworker for one person. It has its own secure storage and its own web address, and it acts on that person's behalf. (In the API and CLI this is called a tenant — same thing.) → Create one

Skill

A reusable ability you can give to assistants — like installing an app. A skill might be "write a sales follow-up" or "review a pull request." You build a skill once and share it with whoever should have it. → Share skills

Tool (MCP)

A connection to another system — Slack, Jira, your CRM — so an assistant can actually do things there, not just talk about them. These connections use a standard called MCP (Model Context Protocol), so "an MCP server" just means "one connected tool." → Manage tools

Organizational knowledge

Your company's information — from Slack, email, documents, tickets — gathered into a searchable index so assistants can answer with real, cited facts instead of guessing. → Connect knowledge

Scopes: how sharing works

Everything you share has a reach: just one person, a project, a department, or the whole organization.

personal  ▸  project  ▸  department  ▸  org
 (just me)   (a team)    (a division)   (everyone)

You don't "create" a department like a folder — a scope is simply a label you attach to people, skills, and knowledge to decide how widely something is shared. → Organize your company

Access

Nothing is shared by default. You grant access — per person, project, department, or org — to decide who can use which skills, tools, and knowledge. → Control access

How it fits together

You create an assistant for someone → grant it access to the skills, tools, and knowledge appropriate for their scope → they sign in and get to work. You set budgets and can review everything in the audit log.

Ready? → Get OpenCrane running